[1]: http://news.gallup.com/poll/216116/few-workers-worry-tech-ma...
I'm starting to get the impression that this genre of "technology gone bad" article is starting to be a safe surrogate for talking about class. The muddling of terms is actually a feature: one can avoid the dirty reality of class by framing it as an inherent feature of technological progress, which, of course, is a good in-and-of-itself (unless you're a dirty commie).
I think the same is true of immigration: low class people blame their poor condition on immigrants, rather than their class standing.
Capital and labour are very standard notions in economics (and go back at least to Adam Smith).
Or maybe people should be less concerned about it. The rate of automation/productivity growth has actually been pretty low over the last decade[1], some of the slowest in the past 70 years.
We could probably build excellent robots to bring food from the kitchen to tables of a restaurant, but the capital costs are just not worth it relative to hiring wait staff (conveyor belt sushi nonwithstanding).
Would it ever be worth it to Chili's to outfit a 40-table restaurant with automated delivery systems, replace 3 wait staff with a technician, and deal with the edge cases (how do tables get cleared??)? Probably not.
Likely most tech ends up actually make existing staff more efficient, to be simply overworked instead of insanely overworked. Tablet digital ordering systems, fast dishwashers, kitchen-side logistics improvements....
McDonald's now has automated drink machines, mobile ordering and in select locations kiosk ordering (on giant touch screens). They've also experimented with call center handling of drive through ordering, so could be ready to potentially hand that over to voice recognition as well.
I think it's a long time before food service jobs are all automated away, but some of the jobs are going away. (McDonald's claims they plan to keep the same number of employees, and shift to provide more service in the seating area)
The belief that automation will hurt workers goes back 200 years and is found in sources as diverse as Marx's writings, JFK's speeches, and warnings from world renowned scientists (the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution). It's a product of the natural human tendency towards pessimism (which is a very useful survival instinct).
But you are mixing concerns. This is mostly old style automation which has never bothered is because it could never fully replace humans so we simply moved to new jobs.
However now we are getting closer to the beginning of a period were people will become FULLY redundant because eventually there will be NO task which machines can’t do cheaper and better than us.
What then?
If common people don’t have stocks or don’t get money from government they will get screwed because there will be no job for them.
We automate the politicians, judges and CEOs out of a job.
> What then?
The machines get bored with doing everything for us, and figure out a way to exist on a another physical substrate elsewhere, like in the movie Her.
Either way it means your value to society is gone.
Your value to society is much more than that. You have value for friends, relatives. You also bring some idea that may be used by others. You may fix or build things that will be of value to someone else. Etc. This is very important.
The other argument is that if you reduce yourself to work, then you'll give credits to the argument that work is everything and that, for example, unemployment is to be ashamed of.
>>> what determines your wages in large part.
The wages should not be that important anymore. That would prevent capital from being predatory. How we achieve that, I dunno, universal income ? maybe... maybe not. But IMHO, if we continue to think wages == beginning of everything, it certainly won't change.
That may be true, but it's more of a statement of faith than an objective truth.
Since all the things you bring up are performance-based (socially successful, successful inventor, etc.), it's also a bit of a sideways move from "how important is your job". It also leaves open the possibility that people can be net negatives to society, so it doesn't really help individuals feel actualized.